Loss of Liberty.
A generation before mine saw the rise of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.
Some of the policies they introduced to Germany were never questioned at the time as they were seen by people both inside and outside of Germany as generally sensible and good for the country.
Most of these measures related to registering people according to their race, religion or long term illness or disability.
No problems; "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". We have heard this and the arguments surrounding it many times recently.
After the end of World War 2 when it became apparent what the German authorities wanted with all that information on their registers, civilised people expressed their horror and said "never again".
Well, good folk, the term "never again" in terms of the United Kingdom at least, actually seems to mean something like "that was a good idea really. Why don't we do it too?"
We have had the controversy over the proposed ID card nonsense for some time now and I suspect that argument will rumble on and on and I will predict a fair amount of civil disobedience when the government tries to force us into registration etc.
However, we shouldn't allow that one issue to take all our attention.
The last few years have seen a lot of other attacks on our liberty.
Taken separately and singly, they seem to be rather innocuous and a lot of people have fallen into the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear trap".
Registration of your personal details for the ID card system: "Nothing to fear, nothing to hide".
CCTV cameras all over the place, watching your every movement: Again "nothing to fear.." etc.
Then came the draconian measures such as keeping people suspected of acts related to terrorism to be either kept in prison without any charges being brought or being kept under virtual open arrest at their homes.
Now the government is proposing to bring in similar measures to curtail the liberty of anyone they say is suspected of being involved in serious crime.
Although I would agree that the threat of terrorism is, on the face of it, the more serious issue when compared to serious crime, it is the latter proposal that worries me the most.
Under this proposal, the government wants to be able to rummage through a suspect's bank accounts, ban them from associating with certain people, restrict their ownership and use of a mobile phone etc. They will even be able to ban a person from using the internet and to restrict a person from accessing his own bank account.
Herr Hitler would have been proud of this government!
It seems to me that we are being deprived of any shred of liberty that we may once have enjoyed in this country.
If people are suspected of terrorism or of serious crime, then the evidence should be gathered and placed before a court for a court to decide whether or not an offence has been committed. The appropriate punishment would then be meted out to the offender.
I believe this government are running "knee jerk" policies which are probably dictated by the shrieking headlines in our daily rags. They can't be bothered, or are not clever enough to focus their efforts on the detection and prosecution of crime as we, as a civilised society, are used to.
What is difficult about that?
Now the government has seen their control orders, as applied to alleged terrorist suspects, fall into disrepute, they are proposing to use similar powers against organised crime suspects but this time via civil powers.
In other words, they will skip the normal criminal court procedures and their rigid application of rules of evidence etc.
What will happen under the new proposals will be that the authorities can go to a magistrate and have a discussion something like:
"This bloke is a real bad bugger. He has a flash car and some really dodgy mates and we think he is probably involved in organised crime. We would like you to issue one of these control orders on him"
"Oh really" says the magistrate, "Well prosecute him then"
"Ah, well the evidence is a bit thin at the moment"
"Well, what evidence do you have then?"
"Well, not a lot actually but honestly, this bloke is a bad 'un, believe me"
"Oh OK then, order granted".
"Thanks Mr Beak. That'll piss on his bonfire!"
I think the Americans refer to "due process". Well, whatever one calls it, we no longer have it.
We have a police force that regularly walks around with weapons. Not satisfied with issuing pistols such as other police forces around the world use, our police forces walk around with machine guns.
If the police were to be armed with side arms, then people would be able to say we now have an armed police force, just like all those foreigners. Just give a lot of them a machine gun and then the government can say "Oh no, these are exceptional circumstances".
Now the government want to short circuit some of the work that should properly be done by the police.
They are more or less saying to the police "Look, don't bother too much about this tedious evidence gathering business, just apply for a control order. Then we can reduce your budgets as you won't need the same levels of manpower".
Once they have a series of control orders in place to cover terrorism and serious crime, there will no doubt be a chorus from government ministers of how successful these are so let's extend the deplorable practice to other issues.
Drivers suspected of bad parking can be made to scrub the cathedral steps perhaps.
Or how about an order to force people who snore loudly to surrender their passport and weekly shopping lists until they have had their noses amputated?
Parents of kids who are badly behaved can be subject to an order to humiliate them. (Oh, I forgot; we have that arrangement already!)
Returning briefly to the issue of CCTV; this country is covered by the largest concentration of CCTV cameras of any country in the world. It has been calculated that the average citizen in this country can expect to be filmed something like 300 times per day, just while going about your lawful business.
If you are in your home for say 30% of the day, you will be filmed or photographed once every 3.2 minutes. Or put another way, you will be snapped once every 200 seconds!
All well and good, I suppose, providing all this leads to a dramatic reduction in crime.
There is absolutely no evidence at all to support any claims of any sort of reduction in crime.
In fact, despite official government lying (or manipulation of data, if you prefer) about crime rates etc., the evidence shows that violent crime is on the increase. Presumably, CCTV cameras along your high street would be put there to deter or detect theft and violent crime. They are not there to catch you fiddling your taxes!
So, as the number of CCTV cameras increases, so does violent crime.
The inevitable conclusion is that CCTV cameras are as much use as a chocolate tea pot when it comes to deterring crime.
There must be a good reason then for the authorities to persist in spending so much money on these intrusions.
Well, don't let's look at these things in isolation. Try looking at them in concert with the other gimmicks, tricks and wheezes.
Add the CCTV cameras to the automatic number plate recognition systems, cameras along our motorways, bogus control orders that enable the authorities to snoop into your bank accounts, a proposal to allow all the many government agencies to share your personal details willy nilly, the collection and retention of your fingerprints and DNA data, regardless of whether you are a criminal or not and of course the grand ID card scheme and the answer becomes a bit more clear.
It is quite simply so the government can keep tabs on every single aspect, no matter how trivial, of your life.
Then what?
That is what worries me.
Where do we go from here?
Why, back to 1930s Germany of course!
PS Did you know that, if you fly to the USA, the government of the USA gets access to over 50 pieces of data about you?
If they don't get the data they want, including your meal preferences, you don't get in!